44
H. J. LETHBRIDGE
Hong Kong, needless to say, was not Africa, and the Hong Kong cadet did not spend his working life in the bush adjudicating the disputes of unsophisticated natives. He worked mainly, unless one of the District Officers in the New Territories, in a many-layered urban society, in which were to be found a number of extremely rich and some highly erudite Chinese. The population of Hong Kong was related in terms of race, language and culture to that of China, the home of an ancient civilisation; and cadets spent two impressionable years learning the language of that country and something of its splendours, and its miseries as well. I suspect many cadets were deeply impressed by their contact with the culture and civilisation of the Chinese, that a process of 'mandarinisation' often took place, especially among those working in the Registrar-General's Department (the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs) where official documents were published in the same form and style as those of the Imperial Chinese bureaucracy.31 I suggest that cadets were paternalistic towards the local population, but that their paternalism was Confucian in spirit and understood by Chinese. Their background and training, in its historical context made this era of cadets not unacceptable to, though not necessarily liked by, Hong Kong Chinese with memories of the behaviour of Chinese officials across the border. British officials acquired in Hong Kong, then, a gloss from the population they ruled. Sir Frederick Lugard, 'in gentle derision', called cadets 'the twice-born';32 and Reginald Stubbs, on a special mission from the Colonial Office to Malaya and Hong Kong, exclaimed in 1910 that they were prepared to advance claims to act for the Almighty'.33 Exposure to life in an English public school and then to life in an Eastern Colony, led not unexpectedly to this consummation of belief.
The contribution made by cadets and ex-cadets to sinology and scholarship in general is impressive. One has only to take note of the publications of such officials as Alfred Lister, J. H. Stewart Lockhart, R. F. Johnston, G. R. Sayer,34 S. F. Balfour,35 Walter Schofield,36 Soame Jenyns,37 R. A. D. Forrest,38 and K. M. A. Barnett.39 Many were also members of learned societies; and a substantial number acquired not only compulsory Cantonese but a knowledge of other Chinese dialects, such as Hakka and Mandarin; a few specialised in Japanese; and those who worked in the Police, Hindi or other Indian languages.